Quick Announcement: I came across the German cover art for Snow Queen’s Shadow yesterday. Click the thumbnail to check that out.

Quick Thanks: My Fantasy Poses post has now been viewed well over 100,000 times, which is awesome. But I’ve noticed that as this continues to spread, I’m seeing a larger number of comments that … well, let’s just say I sometimes take for granted the mostly thoughtful, respectful, and fun comments and discussions from people here on the blog. Glancing at these other sites has been a reminder to 1) STOP READING COMMENTS ON UNMODERATED SITES! and 2) thank everyone here for being generally excellent people.

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It always feels weird to talk about money. Partly this is because we’re taught not to do so. It also feels uncomfortably like boasting. I know a lot of people are struggling right now, and the last thing I want to do is rub their noses in the fact that I had a good year.

At the same time, there are so many misconceptions about writers and how much they make… I continue to run into people who assume I’m rich because I’ve got some books out, people who expect me to live in a mansion with solid gold robokittens and nuclear powered toothbrushes and so on. And I think it’s important to bust some of the myths about writing and writers.

From a financial perspective, 2011 was my second-best year as a writer. Thanks in no small part to the on-signing advance for Libriomancer and its as-yet-untitled sequel, my writing income was $42,772 before expenses and taxes. Here’s the long-term breakdown going back to 2002, because graphs are cool.

Keep in mind that I’ve been writing and submitting since 1995. The jump in 2006 coincides with the release of my first book from DAW. The 2008 spike comes from Germany’s love of goblins.

Two messages I take from this graph are:

It takes a long time to build a writing career.

Writing fiction is not a terribly stable source of income.

Last year’s numbers break down roughly like so:

Novels (U.S.) – $22,000

Novels (Foreign) – $18,000

Self-Published Titles – $1370

Short Fiction – $760

Speaking Fees – $625

The biggest change from 2010 has been a significant increase in my U. S. book advances and royalties. This is the first time since I started doing these posts that my U. S. book income exceeded the foreign sales and royalties. But those foreign sales are still a very significant part of the overall pie, and for that I’ve got to once again thank my agent Joshua Bilmes. Germany made up roughly half of the foreign income, with France taking second place.

My writing expenses came to around $2000, with conventions being the biggest cost. This is pretty much unchanged from last year.

Because this is much more than I made last year, I expect taxes to be rather painful. I paid estimated taxes in 2011, but that was based on the prior year’s income. I’ve been setting money aside, but I’m still not looking forward to writing those April 15 checks.

I’m at the point in my writing career where, based on the past four years, I’d give serious consideration to quitting the day job … if I had a reasonable source of health insurance for my family. Since I don’t, I’m still not in a position where I can write full time.

I don’t know that there’s such a thing as a “normal” writing career, and you definitely can’t and shouldn’t draw broad conclusions from one example. That said, this gives you one example of an author with seven books in print from a major publisher, along with foreign sales to five different countries, a handful of short stories, and a few speaking engagements.

72 Comments

Yeah, writing income is definitely uneven. Much like many freelance positions, I guess. I’m just thrilled that my second full year of writing full-time brought in about 6x the income of the first year (from just under 500 to about 3000).

Thanks for sharing your numbers, Jim!

JasonJan 26, 2012 @ 10:01:05

Well, there goes my hopes and dreams of trying to get rich from writing -JK. I didn’t realize that a successful writer’s income can fluctuate so dramatically from one year to the next. That includes the 5 books in print in 5 different countries. Anyways, congratulations on your second best year ever. I am guessing that you are pretty excited about hitting it even harder this year.

Do you have figures for the number of books that you’ve sold in the past year, or in any other years? I’m not asking for all of the details of your contracts, but I’m wondering how many books you have to sell in a year to make a respectable living from writing.

MrsAWiggins05Jan 26, 2012 @ 10:26:26

And this is why I chose to write children’s non-fiction. Not because I don’t rather write fantasy, but because children’s non-fiction is bread and butter. I can usually make about $200/mo from magazine articles and preschool books, when my fiction and fantasy projects bring in various amounts from $0 to $1,000 a month. Of course, since writing is only my third job after being a stay at home mom and a school bus driver, $200/mo pays for kids shoes and clothes. $1,000 unexpected pays for a honeymoon weekend with my husband and no kids! But that’s all I ever wanted from my writing, so I’m happy not making it my full time job.

I don’t have those numbers off the top of my head. But mass market royalties in the U.S. tend to be around 8%, which would be $.64 per book (assuming a $7.99 cover price). Hardcover and TP royalties are a little higher. If you just assume an overall 10% royalty rate for everything, that will let you do some simple estimating.

Keep in mind though that the income doesn’t necessarily represent the number of books sold. A big chunk of the income this year was for Libriomancer and its sequel, neither of which have been published yet. I may or may not ever earn out those advances…

Thanks for being so forthcoming with your income. I think it’s important writers understand the dollars and cents involved rather than the vagaries of “good” “nice” etc and bestseller lists.
One thing I love about being an indie author is getting ten checks a month from my various platforms, every single month, rather than the four per book advance spread over 2 years. Add up: US Amazon; UK Amazon; Euro Amazon; LSI US; LSI UK; PubIt; Kobo, Smashwords; direct sales; Paypal and probably a couple more.

The problem is that keeping this wonderful cat/Batman silhouette next year will require a drastic dropoff in the 2012 writing income 🙁

T L AndersonJan 26, 2012 @ 11:44:42

This should be required reading for anyone trying to break into the fiction market. Thank you!
I love that you point out people should keep the day job. It’s important for more than just health insurance coverage. Hang on to that connection with people outside the business of writing and entertaining. It’s difficult to write believable dialogue, if you don’t engage in any. 😉

Well, I point out that *I* need to keep the day job 🙂 There are ways around it depending on where you live and your personal situation, but I’d definitely recommend stepping back to assess things like health insurance and the instability of the fiction income stream. And yeah, the connection to other human beings is important too … but I thought that was what conventions were for! 🙂

This is a great post, Jim, and is at once sobering and heartening. As an author with one novel published and firmly in need of a day job, I already well know that robokittens don’t come easy. And now I have Ringo Starr singing that in my head…

Thanks, Jim, for posting this. This outlook gives me a lot to think and worry about, with respect to my prospects for a writing career.

Also no intent to brag (as you point out about your own numbers), but suffice to say that I’ll have made more this year in my conventional job than you made in just about any given year of your writing career. And my income is pretty stable – in fact it’s gone up in every year but two of the last ten years (in those two years it remained flat, or declined slightly if you count the increased cost of healthcare insurance those years).

And that’s what worries me as I contemplate a future as a writer. I write because it’s a fundamental part of who I am, and I want to make a career out of it. But I can’t put my family through the unpredictable ups-and-downs of income, year-to-year. And I don’t really have sufficient free-time to make a real go at a “second job” scenario where I’d be able to put out a book every year, on average (at least not at the speed at which I write), which seems to be something of a minimum prerequisite to being a semi-successful writer (not a universal rule, certainly, but I don’t expect to be an “exception”). It’s for these reasons that I’m slowly coming to realize that I will probably never be a published novelist, no matter how good I ever actually get.

Wow, I love that German cover. It’s always fascinating to me how voracious German readers of sf/f are – we’ve had more rights inquiries from Germany than anywhere else, and MAN do they love their fantasy.

I’m so glad to see that your advances and royalties are going up, and that writing is starting to bring you actual real stable cash, even if it involves some tax suckiness, and even if you don’t have the ability to do it full-time because of insurance issues. Someday, hopefully, you too will have a Scalzi Money Pile.

T L AndersonJan 26, 2012 @ 12:06:44

OH! There is no way I can resist working “Scalzi Money Pile” into tweets and texts. Everyone wants one!

Come, now, Dave. I know full well you’ve read more depressing things, because I’ve read the same proofs.

That said, look at the shiny German cover. It makes the state of how writers are paid feel better.

KatJan 26, 2012 @ 12:15:55

Or there is a line of cats all overlapping, giving you alternating okay and great years!

MichelleJan 26, 2012 @ 12:19:37

I am impressed with your desire for solid gold robokittens and nuclear toothbrushes, not to mention the moon laser referenced in the comments…

but mostly I’m impressed with the honesty about your income stream. I think we as a society would be better off if more facts were available about income streams, how hard it is to make the income people achieve, etc. It might (perhaps) lead to more conscientious buying decisions. We *should* put our money with what we value and support artists and craftsmen/women.

Thanks for sharing this personal info! Since I have taken up as a freelancer and lost my rose-colored glasses along the way, I find myself pleasantly unsurprised. You work hard, you make some cash. You could live off of it but may as well hold out for the movie deal so you don’t have to interrupt your cable tv subscription. Congrats on the second best year and may your graph rise ever upward!

Sad, but true. I have a friend who’s a German native, got started writing there. Sells more of his English works in translation than written natively. And works in translation that we’ve been dealing with get even more interest than that.

Exactly. I know several German writers who’ve decided to try writing in English and are more successful that way. Which sounds absolutely crazy when one thinks about it. But translations (and some of those are really bad as translators aren’t paid well) sell better than books written by German writers. Historical novels might be the exception, but fantasy or crime, definitely. And in the romance field German writers have to take on English-sounding pen-names to sell better.

I haven’t yet made up my mind whether I want to write the novel I’m currently researching in German or English. Right now I’m practising by writing short-stories in English.

My wife and I were just discussing this issue – how my freelance sportswriting income compares with the writing income of non-Scalzi ConFusion Gang authors – and lo and behold, you pop up with this post. I can’t wait to see what happens the next time I give one of your books a good review on Goodreads.

(The answer, by the way, is that it is fairly close, although more consistent. I really need to break into the German market, though.)

SusanJan 26, 2012 @ 17:35:47

I appreciate your being so open about your writing income. Until a few years ago, I naively assumed most fiction writers whose books I saw in the bookstore were full-time writers who made decent middle-class (or better ) livings from their work. Not ’til much later did I realize that most of them actually had a day job, or two. I guess for most writers, they do it because they enjoy it with the possible hope but not any real expectation of becoming Rowling rich from it. So. . . thanks for what you do for your fans.

I really like that German cover. I’m also really impressed by the foreign sales. I never thought about your being such a hot ticket in Germany and France.

Mostly unrelated, totally self-absorbed story follows:
Manymanymany years ago I lived in Germany (didn’t speak German) and had a hard time getting a good variety of English-language books. Based on word of mouth or ads (like those in the backs of other books), I’d mail lists of SF books back home to my SIL to get for me. Months later, I’d get a package w/ the ones she could find. It was very kind of my SIL to do it (especially since she thought I was a freak based on my lists), but the packages were generally unsatisfactory: Sometimes she couldn’t find all of the books in a series, and sometimes the books weren’t anything like I was expecting based on the tiny blurb I read. Often such a letdown after the weeks/months of anticipation. I am SO grateful for all the current-day options for finding/buying books.

Yep, my friend started out as a fantasy writer, couldn’t get anywhere despite selling some short stories and being very well received, and wound up writing historical m/m and fantasy in English. And is selling better in translation than with his German-original works. Sigh.

And on the flip side, I wish I knew how to encourage readers and publishers here in the U.S. to be more open to works from other countries/cultures and translated from other languages…

ShannonJan 26, 2012 @ 20:15:47

I just got home from a reallyreallyreally long day at my day job, at the end of a really long week and really long month. “Quit,” whispered that seductive little voice all day. “If you quit, you could be home writing. Think how much lower your blood pressure would be!”

Then I read this post. Now I remember why I keep the day job. I see that some people found it depressing, but it actually improved my day a bit. It’s nice to get confirmation that I’m making the right choice for my family.

Richard BaldwinJan 26, 2012 @ 22:26:48

In all seriousness, thanks for the info. Now I just need for how to find a day job.

A solid gold robokitten would be awesome, though I suspect the two live specimens in the house might give it a rough time.

From one angle, this is pretty depressing, but from another, it’s very useful info that gives some needed perspective to other fiction writers, and isn’t posted or published nearly as much it should be. Thanks for sharing it.

Definitely 🙂 I’m currently re-discovering French and Belgian comics and they are very different to American comics. Reading literature from other countries in my opinion gives one an insight into that culture and also offers new ideas and new perspectives.

Thanks for being willing to show us the numbers, Jim. Very interesting post.

KaiJan 30, 2012 @ 16:48:45

I won’t lie – I think this post made me want to read you’re novels more then the post that brought me here (Striking a Pose). It’s refreshing to see the honesty in how you represent yourself and for that I thank you. As an aside – a solid gold robokitten would rock my socks.

Well, that burst my bubble. I still want to be a published author, though. Even though you don’t get rich, people follow you around the street taking your picture and beg you to sign their books, right? …..right? No?